Yesterday I was having a chat with one of my colleague on how much plastic waste do we produce. The discussion led us to the source of this plastic pollution. The discussion was considering India, but I think it is applicable to rest of the world too.

Take this scenario. When we go for shopping, we unnecessarily take away too many plastic carry bags from the shop to home. Now do we do with them. Most of middle class family will retain them to be used later on, either as dust bag, or a carry bag for something else. However most of the upper class or say uber rich people throw them away in garbage starting a chain of non interruptable pollution.

Now take this scenario. What do we do with the newspapers and old notebooks and magazines that we have subscribed to? We either give it to raddi wala, who in turn either sends it for recyling or sends it for some scrap. Well, frankly speaking I need to dig out some details on this.

Newspaper bag

My take on these scenario. How about manufacturing carry bags of different sizes and shapes out of these used newspaper? You must have seen this in Fab India store. They sell ethnic Indian items and gives carry bag made of newspaper. But that’s limited to that store only. How about making this national and then global.  I need to do a bit of research on this. But from my past experience in malls and big shops I can say that they are not in market yet. And this is a huge opportunity for us to get started.

I am very enthusiastic about this project. What say?

I call this “eco friendly business”

Edit : I did a bit of research on the market of this newspaper bags in India. It seems it is more taken as a fashion statement rather than an act towards saving nature. Hence this bags are priced very high than their actual cost. What I am suggesting in my idea is to have a cost effective way of manufacturing them so that we target lower strata of society who are the major users of these bags.

Are you a movie buff?

Especially bollywood movies. Then you must be knowing some good details about your favorite movies and the cast and crew of it. If you go for exploring something more than that you’ll probably end up searching details either on internet of video library/museum.

Let us say you look for it on internet. Some of the sites you may refer to IMDB which provides all the information of movies mostly Hollywood. But now a days bollywood flicks are also being listed

Apart from this you may also visit some online music sites like MusicIndiaOnline that lists songs from different movies (dated back to 1940s). So you can search for songs based on movies, actors, music directors, year they were released and so no.

I think I have set the context. What if all this information is available to you visually. As in all at one in some mesh/network form. Take a look at DiggLabs. The way they present real time data of the diggs users are doing around the world in a nicely categorized way is just awesome. Though the information is coming from all over the internet, showing it in a compact form makes it more usable and the learning curve is very gentle.

The adjoining image shows the users (on the periphery) of digg who are bookmarking links across the internet and different colors shows the major categories, the shades of which show the hierarchy within that category. So it’s aptly said that an image is worth 10,000 words.

Now my idea here is to make such a visual system wherein all bollywood infomration can be linked together and shown.

Since India has got a huge mass of population who are bollywood fan, presenting them the data in a new format will be a huge success in its own. And yes the platform or the medium of presenting this data may not be limited to just computer screen, but brought out to multi touch displays. This will make the environment more immersive and engaging. Such installations can be used at Movie libraries or museums or at the offices of some production house.

I have build a small prototype of this in flash, which I’ll be uploading soon. Major task is of building the database. Well all the information is available on internet. We need to write some script (crawlers) which can navigate internet and collect information. I think MusicIndiaOnline is a nice source of information. Though limited it’s very well seggregated, hence easy to parse through and get the information.

Given is a small screen shot of the same.

If you click on one of the movies, it lists all the songs of it and also gives the names of actors and music director, year of release in brief description, which can be easily parsed. And an image is a additional information you can have.

So the premise of this idea is to create a visual system of navigating through bollywood information, which is engaging, rich and usable.